The Entangled State of God and Humanity; The Asheville Jung Center and Peter Todd Explore His New Book “The Individuation of God”
Asheville, NC (PRWEB) August 02, 2013 -- Peter Todd’s new book “The Individuation of God” has just hit the shelves and the Asheville Jung Center is exploring its content. Contributions from archetypal depth psychology, quantum physics and neuroscience elucidate relationships between mind and matter are just a few of the intriguing topics inside. The published work of C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, David Bohm and Teilhard de Chardin outline a process whereby matter evolves in increasing complexity from sub-atomic particles to the human brain and the emergence of a reflective consciousness leading to a noosphere evolving towards an Omega point. The noosphere is the envelope of consciousness and meaning superimposed upon the biosphere a concept central to the evolutionary thought of Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man). His central ideas, like those of Jung, provide intimations of a numinous principle implicit in cosmology and the discovery that in and through humanity, evolution becomes not only conscious of itself but also directed and purposive. Consciousness has become the mirror which the universe has evolved to reflect upon itself and in which its very existence is revealed. The implication for process theology is that God and humanity are in an entangled state so that the evolution of God cannot be separated from that of humankind. A process (Incarnational) theology inseminated by the theory of evolution is one in which humankind completes the individuation of God towards the wholeness represented for instance in cosmic mandala symbols (Jung, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung believes that God needs humankind to become conscious, whole and complete, a thesis explored in Peter Todd’s book The individuation of God: Integrating Science and Religion. The Asheville Jung Center was founded in 2008 to advance the psychology of Carl Jung and promote an international Jungian community. It is affiliated with innerQuest Psychiatry and Counseling, a regional psychiatrist group.
One critical issue explored in The Individuation of God is the epistemological one which underpins scholarly treatments of extended mind and its relationship with matter in process theology, archetypal psychology and quantum physics as well cultural or psychosocial evolution in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. The prevailing position since the seventeenth century has been that of reductionist materialism so that mental (psychic) qualities were either squeezed out of existence or marginalised as mere epiphenomenal by-products of brain processes. The nature of the mind-matter or consciousness-brain relationship is not always made explicit in published work even in psychoanalytic studies although neither classical physics nor Darwin’s theory of evolution could explain the anomaly of mind or consciousness so crucial to the process (Incarnational) theology of Teilhard de Chardin as I argue in my paper Teilhard and Other Modern Thinkers on Evolution, Mind and Matter published in the journal of the American Teilhard Association, Number 66,2013.
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Steve Buser, Asheville Jung Center, http://www.ashevillejungcenter.org, +1 (828) 545-0334, [email protected]
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